Weekly government webinars to boost FPO-corporate ties

The first online session was recently conducted by the government, with Mother Dairy at the helm. The company shared its plans to provide farmer producer organisations (FPOs) with the necessary support needed to sell soybeans and mustard. 

The session was moderated by Maninder Kaur Dwivedi, additional secretary in the Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. The webinar witnessed the participation of 5,400 FPOs out of the 10,000 registered under a scheme launched three years ago. 

Dwivedi assured that the webinar will be a weekly event covering a variety of topics. The main objective of the webinar is to increase the income of farmers and connect them with processors and exporters that will help the farmers sustain their business model. 

Manish Bandlish, managing director of Mother Dairy, said that the pilot project, which the company has decided to roll out in April, aims to procure 15,000-tonnes of mustard from Alwar and Bharatpur in Rajasthan. The procurement will be done through a local FPO Sakhi, and the oil seeds will be processed in a plant in Alwar. 

The company will sell the mustard oil under its Dhara brand. The brand sells about 2,50,000-tonnes of edible oil per year, with mustard and groundnut oils having a share of 60% to 70%. 

Bandlish added that procurement would be done in between April and June, and another three to five months would be needed to analyse the project so that an expansion plan can be chalked out before April 2026. 

According to the National Dairy Development Board’s (Mother Dairy’s parent organisation) plan, the company will be purchasing mustard only from Haryana and Gujarat, soyabean from Maharashtra and mustard and soyabean from Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, shared Bandlish. 

Addressing the FPOs, Devesh Chaturvedi, secretary of agriculture and farmers' welfare, said that forming an FPO is not difficult, but the crucial aspect is to keep it alive as much as possible, to connect it to farmers and move the sustainable business forward. 

He shared that by keeping the challenge in mind, the initiative has been undertaken, and the webinar will help the government establish connections with FPOs. The objective of the webinar is to disseminate information to the FPOs, highlighting the objective of the scheme and how FPOs can be associated. 

Chaturvedi said the government will be reaching out to private entities, PSUs and co-operatives that want to help with marketing or want to be connected with FPOs for new technologies and services. 

He also appealed to the FPOs to increase their membership, which would only be possible when farmers witnessed some value-addition or benefits of becoming members.